“You’re the one I love. You’re the one I need. You’re the only one I see… Finally you put my love on top.”
– Beyonce
While I love Beyonce, and every other musician that has ever written about love, have you ever noticed that all of these songs are about getting love from others? What about establishing love for ourselves?
What does loving ourselves look like? I think loving ourselves takes on many forms. Sometimes it is a belief and trust in ourselves that we can in fact fulfill our goals that we have set out to accomplish. It can also be about feeling that we are deserving of pleasure, and great and wonderful things in life. Furthermore, loving ourselves means being able to accept ourselves for who we are and not who we think we are supposed to be. If things aren’t going our way, it is knowing that we can bounce back and that sometimes that obstacle or hiccup that seems pretty awful and totally sucks in the moment can actually teach us something pretty cool.
I know you are thinking, I already know all of this, of course I know I should love myself and that is so much easier said than done. I could not agree more. Most of us wish we could love ourselves more but feel doomed to act from our usual places.
Here is the really really amazing news.
You already love yourself.
You do! We all love ourselves, it is innately within us. The reason why we are not aware of this love is because we have millions of crappy thoughts that bury those feelings of self love so deep that it is often very difficult to experience and feel it. So really all you need to learn how to do is to learn how to deal with all the crappy thoughts that are covering up the love that we all possess. While I promise you that it is possible for every person to find that place of love for themselves, it is not always a very simple and easy process but it is doable.
Still reading?
Ok, well firstly, we need to take the time to develop an understanding of where our critical thought come from. We need to understand that we are actually telling ourselves unloving thoughts. We need to develop an awareness of the thoughts that are preventing us from feeling the love that we all posses for ourselves. An example of such statements are the dreaded “Should statements.” ‘I should have done that,’ ‘I should be more like this person,’ ‘I should have succeeded in a place where I didn’t.’ There is a reason why we don’t like to think about these statements. If we were aware of how many statements we make in one day that reprimand us for our actions, we’d be so overwhelmed by them that we would feel badly about how badly we feel about ourselves.
Yes this may be overwhelming, but once we see the what, we can then start to appreciate the why. As we were growing up, these thoughts and frameworks always served a major and important purpose in our lives. We developed these thoughts and frameworks because we felt that they will be beneficial to us in some way. We think that in fact these will help us in life, and while they absolutely did at some point, we need to always evaluate if these are still in fact working for us.
Are they? Most of time we used these thoughts to get through some hardships, it was all we could do, but as adults who can grant ourselves the space to evaluate them, we can see that we don’t in fact need to let them govern us any longer. We don’t in fact need them to control our lives. We can let them be and thank them and appreciate them for how they served us.
Is self loving that important that we should put ourselves through this challenging struggle? Why embark on this journey? Sometimes we experience a motivation that is deep within our souls. Sometimes we get this deep drive to learn these things after feeling hurt so many times. Sometimes, we were given a gift of love from someone or something and it transformed us. We don’t quite know what hit us, but we know it was something deep and we want more of it.
Only once we know what that feeling feels like, can we actually have the ability to transform ourselves. Something about knowing what that spark feels like can give us the motivation to want to try to develop it for ourselves and to stick it out for the long haul. While the path may require us to face difficult situations from our past, awareness, patience, and understanding, it is by far the most worthwhile gift that one can possibly give oneself.
There are always obstacles, there is always the old framework that we developed, that we know is so comfortable. We have relied on it for all our lives… how can it steer us wrong? Because it can, and it has, and while it was essential for our survival so early on in life, our capacity as human beings is so much greater than the frameworks and outdated thoughts that envelope our minds and cloud our self love. When we love ourselves, we can identify who we truly really are and accept what makes us uniquely ourselves. Our actions and behaviors come from deep within our souls. The sooner we come to relinquish other people’s ideas of ways things have to be, the more we feel most ourselves, and we can uncover the true lightness which is in all of us.
After all how awesome would it be if finally you put your OWN love on top?
Restartwell 